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Topic: " Darker" New Phobos album (Read 3106 times)

The new studio album from Phobos "Darker" will be released on 1st October 2012.This will again be a high quality Taiyo Yuden CDr, presented in a 4 panel digipak, limited to 50 copiesAlbum pictures and montage available at:-http://phobos-ambient.moonfruit.com/#/news/4564747485

Phobos album "Darker", his third private release to date, is another treat for ambient fans who love longform, overtly dark and intense soundscape music meant for headphone listening.

With four overall dense and at times rather abstract sound paintings, the composer really takes his listener to the next level down the abyss, which isn’t always that easy this time. The third track "Hell’s Gate" is the most challenging in that aspect. Don’t expect any deranged, apocalyptic music though, as David Thompson sticks to sketching deep ambient dronefields along vast textural, highly imaginative farscapes that all roam in the unknown depths of time and space.Rhythm is totally absent here as a multitude of extensive layers unfold and sound effects pass by in the everlasting, haunting and foreboding spheres. The faint of heart though should make sure to skip this disc.

The physical release of "Darker" on high-quality Taiyo Yuden cd-r comes as a four-panel digipak and is limited to 50 copies.

A distant breeze, hollow like the breaths of winds singing in a tree trunk trimmed by holes, opens the rangy and single-phased "Séance". The movement is quiet and dark. Without rhythm it inhales of these long dark strata which surround silence, plunging the listener into the gaps of “Darker”. Without surprises, this 3rd tome about the solitude of the black angels from David Thompson is a profound immersion into the slow waves and blacks lines of a synth which frees as much musical lines as morphic singings which waltz lazily with the shadows of oblivion. From the height of its 29 minutes, "Séance" sweeps of its apocalyptic breaths the vestiges of an arid land and embraces of its atonal wings the last souvenirs of a world formerly of light and hope, leading so the dreamers that we are in the most abyssal cracks of a world to be redone. Black? More than! Neurasthenic? Not just a bit! “Darker” is forged in the melancholic shadows of our lost illusions.Taking back the black humors of his This Desolate Place in 2011, Phobos digs even more in the fantasies of our night terrors with 4 long tracks which kiss at full tones the hooting of souls lost in slow lethal whirlwinds. Alone with his earphones, the auditor is plunged into a duel against darkness in a rich morphic canvas where the music, so intense than black, flows like gloomy torrents into our speakers. Our dark thoughts adopts to the forms of night spectres, fomenting the dark obsessions which feed even more the vision that we can have of the lands that are on the other side of mirrors. And it's to these doors that Phobos leads us after the quiet "Descend"."Hells Gate" is the hallucinatory rendezvous with the other hillside of the tranquillity. The angels are shouting here and the incubus are exulting all the way of this slow ingression in the mephistophelic abysses there where we can hear strange rustles and feel the ochred breaths dancing with weariness around our fears. There are no doubts; "Hells Gate" is one of the heavy monuments of black ambient music that I heard. After this odyssey in the opacity, "Decomposing Lust" re-appears out of darkness with a movement wraps by a scent of iridescent metal of which the grazes are praying for a paradoxical freedom in the ultimate moment of serenity of an album that makes no compromise regarding its first intentions; plunging the listener into the most somber secrets of “Darker”.Quietly Phobos builds himself an enviable place in the very restricted market of the black and gloomy ambient EM. The music of “Darker” is intense and fed the driest of the imaginations with waves of synth which float as spectres of which the ochred breaths are moulding some insidious ectoplasms in search of a life. Possibly ours! But all this are only fantasies loosened by more than 70 minutes of a dark and captivating EM of which the listening in solitary, and in the dark, can only forge these delights that only the imagination can sanction.Sylvain Lupari (December 15th, 2012) http://synthsequences.blogspot.ca/

While Darker is dark, it’s not as dark as the name might imply. This is not grinding, crushing dark ambient, but it is without a doubt an hour spent fully cloaked in dense shadow. Phobos (aka David Thompson) escorts the listener through four long-form works, managing to create atmospheres that are equally as mind-salving as they are lightly unnerving. This is very much a headphone listen because you’ll want to soak up all the small details as Thompson pulls you inexorably down and in. The path starts early on in the half-hour-long “Seance,” with Thompson’s void-born drones welling up to surround you. This is not isolationist ambient per se; rather, it takes on the feel of willful dissociation as the sound drapes over you, alternating between thick, growling pads and the occasional distant howl of rising wind, and you agree to leave yourself behind. The amorphous, constantly folding washes of dark continue through “Descend” and “Hell’s Gate,” at which point Thompson opts to unleash a little discomfort on you. You’ve passed through his veil of shadow, slipped between worlds, and your reward is a gnashing, edge-of-industrial snarl of sound, the darkest space you’ll encounter on Darker. As the track moves forward, the sound tempers toward a softer edge without quite leaving the unnerving sense behind. It’s meant to deposit you into the last part of the journey, “Decomposing Lust.” As befits a well-planned excursion, Thompson arcs the sound upward toward the light here, his deeper sounds rising in tone and feel, stopping just short of the ever-popular angelic choir pads–but still coming off soft and warm enough to relieve forty minutes of sonic tension. Don’t get too comfy, though–in the closing moments there’s just enough dissonance slipped in to leave you with a touch of worry.

Darker perfectly skirts the border of dark ambient, evoking a lot of the same visceral responses without resorting to the ultra-heavy, cloying assaults of sound that often typify the genre. This is more like ambient music with the brightness turned down. There are no harsh edges save for the beginning of “Hell’s Gate”; the effect it has on is eked out of your own darkness rather than being thrust upon you. I like it for the fact that it’s oddly comforting in its discomfort, which is a tricky thing to balance. I’ve had this disc on repeat for several hours, just letting the sounds find my own shadowy nooks and reveling in what comes out of them as a result.

Thanks for posting that Blake, I got a Hypnagogue new post email late last night, but needed to go to bed to get up for work today, so I thought I would post it when I got home, but you beat me to it, thanks again.Oh and Chris, as for collaborations, well you never know what the future may bring